Marching Down Memory Lane As We Celebrate Mediachannel’s Anniverary: “BLOGOTHON”

January 31st, 2010 - by: danny

Today is February 1. On this day, in the year of our Lord 2000, we inaugurated Mediachannel.org at a launch party in Manhattan. Prominent journalists came out to discuss the media crisis we saw ourselves responding to. The late news anchor, Walter Cronkite, who had agreed to serve as an advisor couldn’t make it but sent a video in solidarity. The room was packed. We had commitments from major funders including support from Leonardo Mondedori, now deceased, the visionary Italian publisher, who saw the US media a threat to world culture and wanted to help us change it.

That is when this adventure began and because it may be ending at month’s end. Since I have been at the helm, for better or worse, for all this time, I wanted to share some of our “greatest hits” and memories for the record – if there is is “a record.”

We live in a culture of instant change, technological breakthroughs and ever changing fads and fashions. We are amazed that we lasted as long as we have—although it is still possible for some last minute intervention or infusion of cash that can keep us alive.

We have been on life support so long that we know it won’t take much. Unfortunately, we are in dire economic times where it seems that most of our most ardent supporters are the least able to help. If what we do moves you at all, now is the time to show it.

I wanted to mark the occasion with selections from an unfinished and unpublished book I called BLOGOTHON, about the work I do and what I hoped to accomplish.

INTRODUCTION

It is 5:55 A.M. in midtown Manhattan and a slightly overweight, often bedraggled figure is slowly lumbering in the dark from bedroom to living room in a loft he endearingly refers to as his ‘museum of pre-revolutionary culture.’ He reaches for the cable remote. Where is it? Under the couch again, next to a book he’s been searching for? It is here somewhere. It always is. He yawns, scratches, and stretches. It’s just about six in the morning; time for the day’s first media fix.

Click.

The actor James Earl Jones is pumping phone service for a company called Verizon, a made up name if there ever was one. When his spiel ends, CNN’s news day get underway begins with a tease/capsule of the morning’s four big stories.

Roll the open.
Sound the news music.
Cut to the perky anchor.

Today’s news sounds just like yesterday’s. More killings in Iraq in an unending body count. Then that tall basketball player and his short lawyer start walking into the courtroom building again – what are they wearing today? She’s brisk; he’s loping with none of the energy that we see when he drives that Laker ball to the basket. That question again: was that fling in the night consensual or not?

Then, there are quick shots of fallen CEOs testifying in another court somewhere, and, finally, in “culture” news, Madonna is unveiling her new children’s book.

So much for news. Cut to a commercial urging viewers to tell their doctor to prescribe a purple pill.

Next up: chirpy Chad with more weather “reports” than anyone needs. His technology moves more maps and clouds more quickly than ever. And now he has that Doppler radar and whooshing animations all tracking the big storm. There always is one somewhere on the planet menacing some part of the planet. How cool and meteorological of CNN to provide constant updates. The more extreme the weather, the more face time Chad gets. Chad does not tell us that he gets most of his information directly from the government bigger weather computer.

At this point, our protagonist’s fingers do the walking, changing channels again. Off we go down the dial to the BBC, click, MSNBC, click, and then there’s Fox. This is his daily breakfast of headlines, and “breaking” and not so breaking news. Most of these stories will be “updated” and repackaged for recycling by dishy blondes and white men in suits throughout the day.

This is television, but when watched closely you see it’s a mostly non-visual environment. Chatter and opinions are pervasive; footage and real storytelling rare. The former is cheap, the latter costs money to shoot and edit.

Today, there are reporters offering stand-ups from Baghdad rooftops to anchors hidden behind set-piece desks. There’s an overheated Imus on MSNBC scowling and grousing about the dummies he has on his show, and over at Fox, a quartet of character-based “friends” prattle on with the jock posing as analyst, the comedian adding colorful commentary, and the anchorwoman back from her seventh pregnancy and the Judge opining on subjects that have nothing to with the law. A black news reader interrupts with more F&B – “fair and balanced” news illustrated by still graphics with the latest comings and goings of President Bush a constant highlight.

Over at BBC World, there is a dryer, more serious tone with stories from old outposts of Empire. This morning it is Sri Lanka with stuffy experts who do a context-fill, usually with an upper-class Oxford accent. After about nine minutes it’s on to business news and then the latest cricket scores and football results.

And so, TV-obsessed Americans imbibe the news of the new day. The majority watch local news for traffic jams, fatality counts and gossip. Some years ago a local news study found about half these local “newscasts “carry no news at all.

As you probably guessed the ‘he’ in this story is me, bogging before breakfast, Danny Schechter, “your news dissector,” reporting for duty daily without a salute. Most days, I am surrounded as well by crumpled up newspapers, unread magazines stained with coffee or cereal and other edibles that enable me to kickstart my brain into gear for another day of media watching, and media making.

Some time ago, in the last century and in what now seems to be a personal universe that is far, far way, I was dubbed the News Dissector, a nom de media guerre that gives my compulsive media addiction a vocational role and maybe even a the aura of a higher calling.

Dissecting is usually associated with the frog world, not the news world, but there it is: the aspiration to slice below the surface of current events and pick away at the sinews of what passes for journalism.

On September 11, literally as the twin towers collapsed, I started writing what I thought would be a column focused on news coverage; it quickly turned into a blog because it was updated so often as events changed. For some readers, that blog became a slog since my daily posts, rants and raves often hit the 3000 word mark. Not all of it of course was original scribbling, since I quoted and digested others liberally and directed readers to a wide range of diverse sources. While others read the morning paper, I was and still am, in effect, writing/editing/aggregating my own, with links and resources to boot.

Blogging is made possible by computer software packages that makes updating and linking easy. It enables writers to keep “posting” with factoids or more elaborated ideas. Most bloggers are not professional journalists at all. And most blogs are platforms for opinion and anecdotes and resumes and literary personal travelogues. It’s a medium well designed for an A.D.D culture where anybody and everybody has something to say, and can now say it in a national on-line rorshach and outlet for non-linear outrage and ideas, free associations, raves and rants.

The Blogosphere as it has been called is all of these and more and less. That corner of it that I inhabit is a partisan charged dueling society with a clear right brain and left brain, a center for dissent, dissection and discussion.

When I started just a few years ago, blogging was just emerging inside a media system with more channels than choices, more sources than voices. The whole phenomenon is a reaction against and an improvement on an elite run media system in which professionals dominate the reporting of news and the rest of us consumed it.

Those days are going, if not gone, with waves of people telling their own stories and offering their own take on the stories of others. It represents a vast democratization, a modern reincarnation of Mao’s dicta to let a thousand flowers bloom. His motive was to flush out critics and then destroy them. Today’s citizen journalists are in part out to improve and in some cases supplant a media world that has lost credibility and is in desperate need of being shaken up from below.

At first the paragons of the mainstream media dismissed blogging, challenging its credibility on the grounds of questionable accuracy. But as the accuracy of major news outlets themselves began being questioned, they decided to join in. Today many newspapers offer blogs or encourage staffers to blog;

CNN even has introduced its version of “citizen journalism. As is often the cases,, oppositional ideas which begin on the media’s margins are often brought inside and co-opted.

Years earlier as a radio newscaster, I had developed an ‘anyone can do it but few do’ dissecting methodology in which I compared and contrasted news sources – something few journalists do. In those years during the Vietnam War, our media took sides against “enemy forces.” The enemy was always making claims or alleging crimes; the US government was invariably stating facts or insisting or explaining. During the Watergate follies, the Nixon Administration was often taken far more seriously than its critics until that house of cards collapsed.

As I followed the TV news every day, I came to see how it was driven by institutionally established routines and patterns of coverage. Formats ruled, with news reports called “packages” cut to pre-assigned time limitations. Formulas designed by consultants structured the presentations, which were built around the state of the sets and promoted with graphic branding liners, special music, flashy animations, and look-alike- sound-alike themes. It’s all designed to be modular and interchangeable. News language aspires to be perceived as authoritative and objective, stressing terms like fairness and balance. It isn’t.

And yet when I looked at stories more closely as they flew across the TV screen or as they paraded across the front pages, I could see structural biases and an ideological orientation. I saw who was worthy of being quoted and who wasn’t. I could tell which sources had legitimacy and which did not. I could detect the ways that conventional views colored the news while other views were marginalized. I could sniff out the point of view that was often buried in the ‘on the one hand and on the other hand’ paradigms of reporting.

In the years that followed, I moved from being a media critic to a media maker and then a media “heavy” as an on-air personality, TV reporter, and then producer. I moved from blasting network TV from the outside to trying to change it or at least influence it from the inside. I came to know and like people in the industry and learn from them. And yet at the same time, I felt estranged. I sensed that I didn’t really belong because I wasn’t an insider and didn’t aspire to become one.

Part of the reason for that has to do with class. Back in the thirties, forties and fifties, newsmen (and then women) often came from the working class – like I did. They were suspicious of big shots, lived in regular neighborhoods, drank at bars with locals, and covered stories without pretensions or an identification with the kinds of power that came with the transition of news from a racket or a craft into a profession and a business.

This is not to suggest that there was ever a “golden age” of news, but with corporatization, media concentration, and journalists aspiring to upward mobility trading in their Thom McAnn’s for Bruno Magli’s, the media world began to change.

As media structures changed so did its zeitgeist. Soon entertainment values were in command. Celebrity chasing became a national pastime. Being risk-adverse was in; muckraking perspectives out. As the gap between those at the top of the media business and those that toiled in its boiler rooms widened, the sense of media with a mission diluted.

I joined the media to spotlight the problems of the world and discovered that the media was one of those problems. It was a problem that media, for obvious reasons, had little interest in drawing attention to.

I found myself running up against gatekeepers who wanted to do what everyone else was doing. Small stories interested them more than big ones. As far as they were concerned, no one cared about a lot of the issues that moved me – human rights, fights for freedom and social justice. Individually, they might express a concern, but as decision-makers, they avoided being too controversial and shied away from rocking the boat. TV programmers would tell me how much they admired me, but then explained that the programs I wanted to cover were, well, “not for us.” It soon became clear they were not for anyone.

Change was in the air while substance was often off the air. Foreign bureaus were closing and documentaries were being shuttled off to cable outlets with small audiences. “Reality-based” shows replaced programs that tackled more uncomfortable realities, such as world poverty or AIDS or wars in places like Bosnia or Burundi. I left a network show for a company that promoted a “global vision.”

My salary went down as my work became both more interesting and problematic. We became like the pioneers in the “wild west” who didn’t eat unless they killed some game. We were small businessmen in an age of increasingly mega cartels. We had some successes, but far more frustrations, often having to raise the money to do a show, fight to get it on the air, and struggle to pay ourselves.

We soon learned how high the deck was stacked against us and our idealistic enterprise. It was then we realized that the more important problem was right in front of our eyes – the media itself. We formed Mediachannel.org and four years later we are still going, not strong, but going. It is there that my blog/newscast appears every day. Thousands subscribe to it on e-mail; many others check it out on the web site…”

That was written SIX years ago. I will be sharing more writing from Mediachannel this month. And then…….????

*******

We managed to survive since then but here we are perched again on the edge of an abyss. This may be our last month online unless something good happens. We are taking initiatives and reaching out but these are grim times with many other “causes” that may be more urgent.

Some readers are sending in useful suggestions. We appreciate all of your ideas.

Recently, my friend, Danny Goldberg, the music executive and manger–and former CEO of Air America, wrote an incisive article explaining how it is that wealthy people on the right invest large amounts of money over years in media that serves their ideological agendas while people of means in the liberal-left world do not. He wrote on Alternet, which has a cool, new look:

“Conservatives believe in doing whatever it takes to promote their ideas. Richard Viguerie, viewed as one of the architects of the modern conservative movement, wrote a book in 2004 called America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media To Take Power, in which he explains how the right wing used talk radio among other tools. Viguerie stresses that conservatives understand that ideological change does not usually occur overnight; that it takes patience and long-term thinking to build a movement.”

That’s what they believe. What do we believe?

If you can help, now is the time to do so. Click here to support independent journalism here or checks to: The Global Center, 575 8th Avenue # 2200, NY NY 10018. Mark for Mediachannel.org

Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

The Known Universe Scientifically Rendered For All to See

After hovering over Mount Everest and the gorges that plunge to the Ganges, you are pulled through the Earth’s atmosphere to glimpse the inky black of space over Tibet’s high desert. So begins The Known Universe, a new film produced by the American Museum of Natural History that is part of a new exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

The News Dissector